Right Digital Transformation: The Impact

This story is familiar. The Bank, a respected institution with a long and distinguished history. That has faced many of the same challenges as other institutions in digital transformation. However, it had one advantage: An internal champion, who saw the potential for improvement and set out to create a Digital team.

Their Situation

The Bank was filled with motivated and talented people. They were unable to meet the market demand due to their software development life cycle (SDLC), organizational structures, tooling, funding models and lack of Continuous delivery practices.

With over 2,000 developers, testers, and multiple UI practices teams spread around the globe, Bank’s development process was fragmented to the point that even IT and Business functions were highly compartmentalized and had competing priorities. In other words, the Banks’ process, people, and technology weren’t efficient in delivering customer value.

Technology/Delivery

The technological power of the massive corps was amazing. The bank employed thousands, in large teams, of testers and developers.

This team contributed predictably to a portfolio that was full of projects with high levels of uncertainty and risk. Some projects progressed in predictable, steady time frames, while others were almost instantaneous in relation to a customer, regulator, market or competitor. It was essential to use a two-speed delivery method.

To begin, we tackled certain foundational tasks. Automating continuous integration, continuous delivery and metrics helped improve SDLC maturity for the “Right Digital Transformation”.

Based on our review of the company’s processes and systems, we then created a small group for specific missions. They are using hit and trial for problem solving. The team evangelized positive changes to the bank.

Some of these missions included Per Team Test Environments (Alted Functional Testing), Automated Builds and Service Virtualization.

Metrics that Matter

Our favorite saying is “People should have fact based conversations.” Unfortunately, many companies are more reliant on intuition and guesswork than they are on concrete data.

We believe in the power of data, metrics, analysis, to gain insight into a wide range of points as well as processes that make up the E2E SDLC. If these management information streams are implemented well, they will allow us to spot potential problems early on before they become major issues. They allow us to evaluate project progress and its status accurately. The levels of metrics depends on the feedback as we divide levels into three types: Portfolio, Software, and Program.

Results

These improvements were significant for the bank. The release frequency increased from once a month to twice a month. In addition, the payload for releases more than tripled in terms of value and maintained predictability. Automation grew, defects declined, and cost remained largely constant. The bank is now able to respond quickly to the market and provide excellent online banking services to their customers.

This “bank” is a great example of what “Right Digital Transformation” can do for companies. Modern businesses need to use a similar process for surveying and curating in order to achieve real success.

We can eliminate the “gut feel”, which is a result of old management systems, and by switching to this objective model and creating a transparent, data driven organization which can help companies to sharpen and pinpoint their oversight.